My knees hurt after playing basketball and I’m finding splotches of grey in my beard from time to time. But the true sign I’m turning into an old curmudgeon is that I don’t really like going out for New Year’s Eve.
Every year is a guarantee of being cold and overcharged but this year, rather than sit on my imaginary porch and rock on my imaginary rocking chair complaining, I suggested that we take a trip to somewhere warm and celebrate the New Year traveling.
Initially this led us to book flights to New Orleans, using Southwest points, but we canceled those after not being able to find any hotels we could reasonably afford.
Staring at a map and finding places that we could feasibly visit over a long weekend led us to look into New Mexico and North Carolina (too far) and Michigan and Wisconsin (too cold). We settled on Arkansas and the beautiful Ozark mountains. And so on a chilly, dark December morning we loaded our bags up, said goodbye to our indifferent cats and headed south.
One key to a good road trip is finding interesting places to stop along the way and this is especially true when the trip will be more than 10 hours. Using the website roadsideamerica.com I spotted our first stop, “The Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail” a pyramid of munitions and nuclear waste outside of St. Louis.
During World War II, this place had been a major manufacturing site for munitions and as our military focus shifted from Nazi Germany to former ally the Soviet Union the production at the site shifted as well and began to process raw uranium into yellow cake that was sent to other sites. The site was essentially forgotten about until a gigantic cleanup effort began, culminating in a trapezoid storage container designed to hold the waste for a thousand years was built. This being America, it was turned into a tourist destination that you could climb on top of.
Our next stop was Elephant Rocks State Park, an incredible and easy accessed site populated by enormous rocks that can be climbed over, trekked through or belly flopped onto.
There were a few families in the park and the rocks are right next to the parking lot making this something that anyone can stop visit and have a blast exploring at. I coaxed Emily into joining me hopping between some of the taller rocks and we eventually reached a dead end that culminated in me having to fireman’s carry Emily off one of the larger rocks.
We barreled on down to Little Rock, grabbing some pizza along the way and settled into our hotel, visiting Core Brewing Co. for a quick night cap.
The next morning we woke up and headed out to Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Warm moments in the outdoors in the waning days of 2016 were what had drawn us into this trip in the first place and Pinnacle Mountain did not disappoint. A quick thirty minute drive from our hotel brought us to the park and we quickly ambled up a mostly abandoned trail. The path was well marked and the warm air was occasionally interrupted by pleasantly cool breezes, a far cry from the weather in Des Moines.
Eventually we felt lost. Shortly after discussing how easy the trail had been for climbing a mountain we hit a dead end. The red markings that indicated the trail path were gone and we sheepishly backtracked and found the red markings were now on climbable boulders heading skywards. “This should be fun” I thought to myself and we spent the next forty five minutes ambling up desk sized rocks while a turkey vulture watched from a perch unimpressed.
We were feeling pretty excited about the adventure until a group of grade-school aged kids came into view, descending the rocks with ease. The top of Pinnacle Mountain was beautiful and full of many people who had taken the more developed West Summit trail up. After enjoying the view we descended the West Summit trail and then walked a few miles to where we had parked. The rest of the day was spent exploring a couple breweries and eating some middling sushi, which we felt we had definitely earned on those rocks.